A Time for Change

I wanted to let you all know that I will be transferring schools next year. I have decided to leave Brookwood High School (where I am currently one of four Latin teachers) to go to Parkview High School (a school 10 minutes away from my current one). Bob Patrick, the department head, asked me to become the school's 5th Latin teacher there next year, and I have accepted. In August, I will join its current team of Latin teachers and will be teaching alongside Latin CI users Bob Patrick, Miriam Patrick, Rachel Ash, and Caroline Miklosovic. 

The big question which folks are asking is why. I wish I could give a better response than "It is time for a change," but that is indeed the truth. I wish I could say that I was mad, angered, or offended at my co-workers or administration, but that is far from the reality; they, in fact, are the reasons why I wanted to remain. Simply put, though, it is time. I have been at my school for 17 years (over 1/3 of my life!). My stay has run its course, and it is time to move on. 

Yes, the opportunity to work in a completely CI Latin program certainly was a HUGE motivator but not the sole reason. I am very much looking forward to working alongside Bob, Miriam, Rachel, and Caroline, as they have "untextbooked," and I am so ready to leave behind the textbook. One of the main draws for transferring was that they are teaching from CI Latin novellas, which they themselves have written. I also really want to teach the soon-to-be-published Latin version of Brandon Brown Wants a Dog! I have been waiting years for this book to come out, and nothing is going to stop me from teaching from it!

I am thankful for my time at Brookwood. Over the past 17 years, my administration has always been incredibly supportive of the Latin program. I came to Brookwood in the fall of 1999 as the 2nd Latin teacher, where the Latin enrollment was 225 students. Now in the spring of 2016, I have helped grow the program to now four Latin teachers and over 500 students enrolled in Latin. I know that I am leaving the Latin program in the very good hands of my three colleagues.

My goal for these final 3 months is to enjoy every moment left at Brookwood, even the bad ones. I am very grateful for what I have learned at my current school and am looking forward to what my new job will have to offer. 

Conference Season

It is the beginning of March, which means that I am in the midst of conference season. For the past 3 weeks or so, I have been presenting on Comprehensible Input at a number of conferences, and I still have one more presentation to give this weekend. 

A few weeks ago, I attended the 2-day Living Latin in New York City (LLiNYC) event sponsored by the Paideia Institute. This event drew the top Latin speakers from all over the country (and from parts of the world) in an effort to promote Latin as a living language. Around 150 people attended this event. The Paideia Institute had invited Bob Patrick and me to present on Comprehensible Input in the Latin Classroom at the event, so Bob and I flew up for the event (thanks to Paideia Institute for paying for our travel and hotel!). Both Bob and I were given two slots each, so we decided to give a two-part presentation on CI theory on the first day (with him going first in the early afternoon and then me later that afternoon) and then to give a two-part demo on the second day.

Now leading up to my first presentation at LLinYC, I was feeling like a fish out of water. By no means am I a master Latin speaker at all - even after attending six Rusticationes, I am only an Intermediate Mid/High speaker at best. Prior to my presentation, I kept thinking, "What the heck am I doing here? What is my name doing on this list of expert Latin speakers? I do not belong to be here. Even if I am here to present on Comprehensible Input, what do I really know about it? I can understand why Bob was invited, but me? I write a blog on CI, and suddenly now folks think that I am an expert on the topic. If folks only knew..." I was dreading my presentation, because I felt like a complete and total impostor.       

But then I began to speak and to give my presentation. Immediately, the doubt completely disappeared, and I was 100% comfortable speaking to the group. I began to speak from my heart on the topic, and quite honestly, it was like another person was talking through me, because this person seemed to really understand CI theory (that couldn't be me, could it?) and to speak with authority on the matter. An excitement was surging through me as I was speaking. In short, I was having so much fun presenting on the topic.

I do not write this to brag, because quite honestly, I still do not recognize who that person was who gave that presentation. I write this to say thank you to all of the CI teachers, whose blogs I have read and have showed me that I am not alone in my CI journey; to all of the CI presenters whose presentations have taught me so much and of whose audience I have enjoyed being a part; and to all those CI users, who have encouraged me and motivated me to want to become a better teacher. It was all of your voices which were speaking through me at LLiNYC. Maybe one day, I will be able to add my own voice.

P.S. That weekend was my first trip to New York City. For the record, it was SO cold! The wind chill was in the negatives! In spite of the freezing weather, I absolutely loved the feel of the city. I hope to return again!

Word Frequency Counter Tool

I have had the pleasure of seeing noted CI/TPRS expert Karen Rowan present many times both in my district and at NTPRS. Every time I see her present, I walk away with a number of new strategies and tools. One online tool which I have seen her demonstrate is a Word Frequency Counter website.

NOTE - there are numerous word frequency counter websites online. This particular one is no different from any others, but it happens to be the one which I use.

What I love about this website is that it allows me to type (or cut/paste) a text and to find out the frequency of each word. When I am writing stories for my students, this is very important, because it helps me see if I am getting in enough repetitions of a target word/structure. If I feel like it is not enough, then I need to find ways to get in more repetitions.

The tool is quite easy to use 
1) Go to http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html

2) Type in your text in the "text box"

3) After inputting the text, click on "count words"

4) You will then see a list of words and how many times each word appears in the story. It will break it down into total words in the story and then into unique words in the story. You can also choose to have the list arranged alphabetically. NOTE - a different form of the word counts as a unique word, so for Latin, that may be something to consider. 

This tool has been of great use for me - I hope that you will find it helpful too!

One Word at a Time (OWAT)

This activity was developed by my friend and fellow Latin CI user Bob Patrick, and it has now become one of my go-to activities for starting a new "chapter" because it allows me to introduce 8-10 new vocabulary words/structures in a fun, engaging way.

Directions

1. Pick 8-10 new vocabulary words which you wish to introduce. A mix of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs is good.
2. Write one vocabuary word and its English meaning on an index card. Repeat until all words are done.
3. Organize class into groups of 3-4 students.
4. Each group needs to have a sheet of paper, a writing utensil, and a student who will serve as recorder.
5. Give each group a card.
6. Inform students that they will be writing a short story in Latin as a group.
7. As a group, the students are to create a sentence in Latin which uses the word on the card. They are to underline their word in the story when they use it.
8. When the group is done, they call you the teacher over to check the "grammar" of the sentence. If something needs correcting, then tell them.
9.  When the group is done with the word, they are now to switch with another group who is done. Sometimes, I have more words than groups, so I put the extra cards on a desk so students can go up to the desk and exchange words there.
10. The group then writes a new sentence as part of a story which now incorporates the new word. The group calls you over to check the grammar and to make any corrections. Once that is done, the group finds a new word and repeats the process.
11. Once most groups have used 3/4 of the words (if not all of them), tell the groups that they have a few more minutes to come up with an ending to their story. For this part, they will not call you over.
12. Collect the cards and stories
13. You as the teacher type up their stories (they may require grammar editing), and read them as a class on the next day.

Observations

1. This is a fun activity, because since students do not know which new words they will be getting, the stories suddenly become very random, which makes them all the more fun to read.
2. Students really want their group's stories to be read.
3. This is a great way to do pop-up grammar when students ask you to look over their sentences.
4. Because each story has specific targeted vocabulary in it, students enjoy seeing how different groups use those words, so there is a degree of anticipation and of vested interest.
5. Because each story has specific targeted vocabulary which students had to use, and because you review each story with them as a group, students acquire those 8-10 words VERY quickly.

Here are some other writeups about OWAT

Latin Best Practices CI Resources 

TPRS Q&A

Example of OWAT w/ Latin 1

Targeted Words

1) sollicitus 

2) invenit

3) femina

4) bonus

5) frater

6) fortis

7) semper

8) parvus 

9) conspicit

10) gladius

Story

Ariel est nympha marina (mermaid). Yoda Arielem conspicit. Yoda est parvus. Ariel fratrem emere vult. Yoda est sollicitus et perterritus, quod Ariel Yodam emit. Ariel est tristis, quod Yoda non est bonus frater. Ariel fortem fratrem vult. Ariel fortem fratrem videt sed eheu! frater est femina! quod frater est femina, Ariel est irata, et gladio (with a sword) feminam necat (kills). nunc Ariel est semper irata. Ariel fratrem non vult, sed pecuniam vult. Ariel Publix invenit, et Yodam vendit. Ariel pecuniam habet. subito Flavia apparet! Flavia Yodam emit, sed Flavia displodit. edepol!

Getting Caught Up in Activities and Not in Acquisition

Every time I go to world language conferences, I am always looking for new activities for my students. If you are like me, you find yourself getting into a rut with the same old activities, and you want to add some novelty to your classroom. A danger exists, however, in doing this, because we can easily get caught up in activities and not in acquisition itself. We look for the next "fun" activity to add to our arsenal. We so want to engage our students that we actually end up just entertaining them instead, and as a result, in blindly throwing activities at students, sequencing and scaffolding can become disjointed, and little/no language acquisition actually occurs.

Now do not get me wrong: I am not opposed to activities. I like a good game of vocabulary BINGO, because it is a nice break for students (and for me), and I definitely enjoy using Kahoot with students every once in awhile. At the same time, I do not want to rely on these as primary activities.

If I am going to be implementing Comprehensible Input in my classroom, regarding activities, the basic questions which I must ask are this: is this activity promoting language acquisition through the delivery of and interaction with understandable messages? Where does this activity fit in the acquisition process, i.e., if it is output related, has enough input preceded it that output is a natural overflow? These two questions serve as my litmus test.

But let me also say that teaching using CI is a process and definitely takes time to learn. By no means do I ever want to turn off someone from using a CI activity regardless of his/her familiarity with CI. I will be the first to say that I am still learning how to implement CI in my classroom!   

If you have never attended a Blaine Ray workshop or attended NTPRS, I highly recommend that you do, because you will get the chance to experience language learning first hand like one of your students. I feel like I have learned so much about sequencing CI activities just from attending Betsy Paskvan's Japanese sessions at these past two NTPRS conferences (and yes, in many cases, i have taken her Japanese lessons and Latinized them!). Apparently, Betsy's sequencing of activities has worked, because I can still retell her "Yoda, Darth Vader, and Oprah" story in Japanese, and that was almost two years ago! 

In Which Language Should I Assess Reading Comprehension?

For the longest time, I struggled with this idea: when assessing reading comprehension on a test, should the questions/answers be in English or in the target language? In my early years of teaching, I used to assess purely in English, because that is how I myself had been assessed when I was in school, i.e., I did not know any other way. When I started to use more active Latin in my classroom, however, I switched over to only having the questions/answers written in Latin, because in my opinion, "This is a Latin class, not an English class! Having the questions/answers in English smells of translation!" (See one of my former blog posts which addresses the role of translation in a CI classroom). A few problems, however, began to arise:

• I noticed that it was possible for students to answer questions correctly from the reading passage without ever having understod what they were reading, because they were savvy enough to know how to pick the correct answer.
• When reviewing the test with students afterwards, I began to see that many students actually understood what they had read in the passage, but they did not understand the question or the answer choices due to mistranslation.

Leave it to the great Martina Bex to save the day! Last year I read a post on her blog which logically addressed this issue and every question which I had. As a result, I now assess reading comprehension only in English. Below is a link to her post.

Reading Activity or Reading Assessment

I still do have one question which I am mulling over: If students are being assessed over a passage which they have read and prepared ahead of time, (i.e., you have explicitly told students which passage(s) will be on the assessment), should the questions and answers then be in the target language? My experience has been that when students know the passage ahead of time, in many instances, they end up memorizing it in English and then never refer back to the passage on the assessment if the questions/answers are in English. Is there a way around this? If students know prior to the assessment that the questions/answers will be in the target language, will they not pay more attention to the language itself during their re-reading of the passage in their preparation? The jury is still out on this one for me. Any thoughts?

Grammar Experts

One of the myths about Comprehensible Input is that grammar is never taught. The truth of the matter is that grammar is indeed taught in a CI classroom (see my former post called Grammar is Not One of the Five C's), but it does not hold a preeminent position in the teaching of the language.  

For the past few years, I have been incorporating "grammar experts" into my classroom, whose sole purpose, like the title implies, is to serve as the "grammar experts" on particular forms. This is a take on Ben Slavic's student jobs, and for all I know, maybe the "grammar expert" is on his list - quite honestly, I do not know from whom I learned this or if I indeed just thought of the idea myself (so if you are the one who taught me this, please let me know so that i can give you proper credit). Regardless, I have found it incredibly useful.

The idea is quite simple: whenever I cover a new language structure, I assign a student to be the "expert" for that structure. The job is simply to shout a particular set answer to the class and to me whenever I ask for it during a 30-second grammar timeout in English. Here are some examples of my "grammar expert" jobs and their lines:

• -BA- person - whenever I ask "What does -BA- mean in a verb?", this student yells out "was/were BLANKing"
• -RE person - whenever I ask, "What does "-RE" mean at the end of this word?", this student yells out "-RE means "to BLANK"
• VSUX person - whenever I ask, "What does this V (S, U, or X) tell me in this verb?", this student yells out "BLANKed"
• -UR- person - whenever I ask, "What does this -UR- in the middle of the word translate as?", this student yells out "about to BLANK"

Observations

1. Because these are done during a 30-second grammar timeout, it is done very quickly and does not take up too much time.
2. It is actually a fun way to do a grammar timeout, because if I ask a question requiring a grammar expert to respond, heaven forbid that this student not respond quickly enough, because the class will immediately let that student know and in many instances will respond for that student!
3. I am not the one always having to explain the structure but rather the grammar expert does with a quick line.
4. I used to have grammar experts for the names of verb tenses and of noun cases but not any more, since I do not ask for tense names and noun cases too much. I do ask for word function (subject, verb, direct object) due to the inflected nature of Latin.
5. It is a great way to foster community and a sense of belonging in the class. I have students BEGGING me to be the grammar expert for the next upcoming language structure, because they want to be able to shout out the grammar line to the class.